MAY 10, 2025
Rude Pundit is the pen name of Lee Papa. Papa grew up in the swamps of Louisiana’s Cajun country, where he was a “poor white bigot” raised on a solid diet of William F. Buckley, Ronald Reagan and “gay-fearful Neanderthal retardation.” Today, he’s a playwriting professor by day and the wildly popular, unapologetically liberal blogger by night. His one-man show, "The Rude Pundit in the Year of Living Rudely," was featured part of the New York International Fringe Festival. Papa is also the author The Rude Pundit's Almanack.
Unlike those pussy states Indiana, Arkansas, and Georgia, Louisiana will not be out-rednecked when it comes to discriminating against LGBT residents who want to get married. Sorry - when it comes to the religious freedom for Louisiana's people to pick and choose which parts of the Bible they want to enforce. Continue Reading...
Whenever you hear from a weaseltwat like Governor Mike Pence defend Indiana's odious Religious Freedom Restoration Act, they inevitably point to the original RFRA, a 1993 law signed by President Bill Clinton. In the Senate, the bill was sponsored by Democrat Ted Kennedy and Republican Orrin Hatch. It was supported by everyone from the National Association of Evangelicals to the American Civil Liberties Union. And it passed the House by a Continue Reading...
You remember a little over a year ago when 300,000 people in West Virginia, including most of the city of Charleston, had to go without drinking and washing water for weeks because a company of fucknuts called, without a hint of shame, Freedom Industries, didn't inspect the big ass storage containers of dangerous-ass chemicals that were on the edge of a river just 1.5 miles from a water plant. You remember that, right? When everyone had to Continue Reading...
That's a big bunch of oil workers from the United Steelworkers union on strike at a refinery in Kentucky. They and thousands of others at refineries and chemical plants in Texas, California, and Washington are staging the first USW walkouts since 1980. And they're doing it not just for wages, but for one of the reasons why unions started in the first place: worker safety. And they're striking against the biggest oil conglomerates - Chevron, Continue Reading...
Believe it or not, it's possible to believe a couple of things at once. It's possible, for instance, to swear off tequila because of one wonderful and terrible evening in a Cuernavaca shack where you won a drinking contest but lost so very much afterward, yet you can still think it's great to drink straight liquor. It's possible to give up on fucking twenty year-olds because, god bless 'em, they mostly don't know who the Ramones are, yet not Continue Reading...
The Rude Pundit wants to return to the story he told yesterday of Janat Gul, one of 26 men who were completely and utterly innocent, but were tortured by the CIA in order to squeeze out some "information" on some "threat." Others have discussed Gul now, about how he was grabbed in Afghanistan or Pakistan based on a single source saying, "That fucker, Janat Gul, he's into some shit," how some in the CIA thought he was a worthless target, how he Continue Reading...
By the time you read this, Jessica will probably be dead, but until then, I will try to write about her in the present tense. She is a former student of mine who returned to college after years away, so she got my Gilligan's Island references in my classes. She is an utterly jubilant presence, a large woman who is a fount of joy, loving most everything she did at school and tolerating with great humor those things she did not. I directed her Continue Reading...
If you listen to the media mostly on the right, but some on the left, by this point in the administration of President Barack Obama, we should be in a Road Warrior-like hellscape of crushing debt, death panels sending us off to concentration camp ovens and calling it "medicine," riots in the streets over the confiscation of guns, surveillance nano-drones entering our rectums in order to hear what our brains are thinking, undocumented Mexicans Continue Reading...
Featured here is a photo of police patrolling the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, in the wake of a night of riots and looting in the wake of the shooting of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown by a white cop. In that suburb of St. Louis, the population is 67 percent black, but there are only three black cops on the 53 person police force, with 2 other non-whites). What's fascinating about the picture is that the front line of five officers (two Continue Reading...
That screenshot shows two New York City cops trying to convince the corpse of Eric Garner that he's not dead. Garner, 43 and black, died after being put in a chokehold by the police for not allowing them to arrest him for, as the NYPD says, selling cigarettes illegally. That is, he was selling individual cigarettes for 50 cents each from untaxed boxes, and he needed to be stopped. Continue Reading...
Look at that church. Isn't it a pretty little church? It's St. Mary's Church in Grafton, Massachusetts. It's freakin' idyllic, no? It's also deeply invested in anti-abortion actions. The congregation participated in 40 Days for Life, an action during Lent that 17,000 churches around the world took part in, with another 40 Days planned for September 24 to November 2. Continue Reading...
1. The Louisiana House voted yesterday in favor of a bill that "requires physicians who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of the facility or medical office where it took place. It also imposes the same restrictions -- including a 24-hour waiting period -- on abortions induced by medication as those carried out through surgery." This means that at least three, perhaps four, of the remaining five family Continue Reading...
This week, in McAlester, Oklahoma, a black man who committed a truly heinous crime was tortured to death by the state. No one is going to shed many tears for Clayton Lockett, who shot a teenager and had her buried alive in 1999. But the question that needs to be asked here, loudly and clearly, of each and every citizen of Oklahoma, "Are you ok with the way Lockett was killed?" Because ultimately, governments being empowered by the people that Continue Reading...
Here's a couple of things the Rude Pundit read today that are bugging the shit out of him: Over in South Carolina, some state legislators got all pissy when the University of South Carolina Upstate was gonna feature, at an LGBT studies event, a monologue play titled How to Be a Lesbian in 10 Days or Less (which sounds like the greatest TED talk ever). It's by Leigh Hendrix and performed under her stage name, Butchy McDyke. USC Upstate had Continue Reading...
"I wonder what's going on with the water," the Rude Pundit thought. So he clicked on over to the Charleston Gazette to see if schoolchildren could use water fountains without getting sick, which should probably be a bare minimum goal in the greatest country with the greatest school system with the greatest children on Earth. What he ended up seeing on the website's front page was a parade of legislative grotesqueries that would make the Continue Reading...
